Zonbu is working for the weekend & for us

There have been a few potholes so far on the road to a Zen Zonbu experience, but I don’t mind, this is a fascinating space.

More importantly, I hope you are noticing that the Zonbu team is actively reading and participating in the discussions here. Not only that, but it is late Saturday evening where I am, and early Saturday evening where they are and they are listening to our observations and concerns and sharing information…

Enable Num-Lock at boot please

There is an easy fix to this minor annoyance and I’ll hop in the BIOS myself and turn the num-lock on by default at boot, however, I did want to flag it for the Zonbu team.

[EDIT] I checked the BIOS and discovered Num-lock is ON in the BIOS, and noticed it goes off when the kernel starts to boot. So it does appear to be a software issue. I’ll check on it more and report back.

I realize it is personal peference but I know almost no one who doesn’t want numbers, by default, when they use their number pad. Of course I’m also the pointy haired boss, and do a lot of work in spreadsheets…

Out of curiosity, what would others expect the default to be when you sat down at your Zonbu after each power-on? Should the Num-Lock be enabled?

-Mr. Zonbu

Upgrade Release Notes & Firefox now 2.0.0.6

Five days ago I wondered out loud how long it would take the Zonbu team to push the latest Firefox security upgrade out to Zonbu users…

Swiftfox for the Zonbu?

I can only assume that the Firefox included with the Zonbu is already heavily optimized for the Via C7 platform, but in the event that it isn’t, does anyone know if there would be any value in applying some of the attention to detail that the boys over at Swiftfox do?

-Mr. Zonbu

MPEG2 video playback not functioning?

I first noticed a problem with MPEG2 file playback on my simulator.

As I wasn’t running the correct hardware, which includes an on-board MPEG2 decoder, I assumed that was my issue.

It now appears that MPEG2 video clip playback, within Firefox, is not working even on the official hardware. Nor is desktop MPEG2 playback.

As I’ve said before, the box can impressively handle almost any media format I’ve thrown at it so I was a bit surprised by this discovery. One sample clip that it can’t seem to handle is this one: http://www.pangolin.com/images/video/CREATN_2.mpg

So I set about exploring why that might be the case…

What do you want to know about the Zonbu?

Welcome all new visitors.

I’ve noticed our traffic growing in leaps and bounds, so there must be lots of curiosity about this little Zonbu box.

I’ve got some spare time this weekend, and lots of questions of my own I’m going to explore but I thought I would throw the comments section open to anyone who has a specific question about the box or its contents, applications, performance etc.

If I can reasonably research and answer the question, I’ll post the results here.

What do you want to know about the Zonbu?

-Mr. Zonbu

The Zonbu gets noticed…

I noticed this morning that some new posts on the web about the Zonbu have been getting syndicated to some major sites, including links to this blog.

Ed Dumbill talked about the Zonbu unit is his blog, and it has been syndicated out to planet.debian.net as well as planet.gnome.org, both high traffic sites.

My regular readers will also be amused at the Debian connection, as I’ve made no secret of the fact that I feel that Debian or a major derivative would make a more appropriate base for the Zonbu stack than Gentoo.

Regardless, the Zonbu is getting some excellent press coverage and great feedback. Check out the articles and welcome to any new readers who just discovered us.

-Mr. Zonbu

Instant-On Ideas

I was just thinking, maybe the boot time of the Zonbu doesn’t matter all that much.

I am about to head out to do some shopping and I was going to shut my Zonbu down, then it occurred to me, since it is only sipping 9W, I could just leave it on…

Zonbu boot time & Firefox performance timing

The low power consumption and utter silence of the Zonbu are very appealing.

Amusingly, the Zonbu has caused me to notice how ungodly loud the water cooler is in my dining room.

But do these environmental benefits come at a significant performance and boot time cost over a regular PC? I set out, stop watch in hand, to find out how the Zonbu compared with my desktop PC in this regard…